Lego City Undercover was certainly a bright spot in the Wii U's library, bringing fun, open world gameplay to the classic Lego template. Still, it wasn't a perfect game by any means, and one aspect that received universal negativity was the positively heinous load times that continuously plagued it. Essentially, if you re-entered the overworld map from an interior area, you'd be faced with over a minute of staring at a loading screen, and this obviously got old pretty quick.

Many were hoping that the Switch port, then, would cut these load times down, seeing as how the hardware is more powerful this time around and the developers have hopefully had more time to optimize it. Unfortunately, the reality is rather disappointing. While the load times have been cut somewhat, it's really more of a change from "terrible" to "bad". Here's a video comparison:

Mitch has been a fan of Nintendo ever since he got his start on the GBA in 2005. When he's not busy playing games or writing, you can find him down at his local MMA training facility learning how to punish the unrighteous.

I was going to purchase this, but I knew beforehand how long the load time were on the wii u and one the reasons I was hoping to pick this title up was for shorter load times. Oh well, guess I'm gonna skip this one.

If TT were to inform us within 2 weeks that they have a plan to reduce load times, then I might pick it up via Amazon (to get the discount). Otherwise, I'll wait for the price to drop substantially (as I have the Wii U version, but want to transition my games to Switch).

Okay, that's probably not true. I'm sure bringing this game over from Wii U to Switch and PS4 took a lot of effort, but this is the one thing EVERYBODY was asking for when we found out it was coming out on better hardware.

Let's still hold hope that the update can fix this issue a little bit more though guys.

I never played the original, nor the not-up-to-scratch 3DS version.
I am very disappointed about the Switch port having a similar, lesser yet still bad issues (loading times), but I'll pick it up. Maybe not on release day though as I am still playing TLoZ BotW, perhaps after or later this month.

Great. Well I've already paid for my copy :/ Leaving it sealed to see if this supposed update fixes the load times. So very very disappointed in them. As developers they've become lazier and lazier over the past few years

The original release was one of the most notoriously unoptimized games in recent years. You have your head in the clouds if you thought WB was going to invest that heavily to clean up a quick port meant to pad out the spring schedule. It's the unfortunate reality.

What a bunch of crap. Guess I'm not picking this up. What the hell are they thinking. I love my switch but where are the games. I'm beginning to think there are a bunch of idiots running Nintendo at this point. Wii u ports should be on store shelves with improved everything to fill this gap of nothing. Snake pass was ported in 3 weeks you can't tell me that they could not have thrown out a few ports. Very unsatisfied.

I don't pay £40-£50 for games that I already own, even if they've had a few things added (in this case, local co-op), but I did love this on Wii U and planned to get it when it was around the £15-£20 mark on ps4 to play through again with the trophies (honestly Nintendo, get an achievement system). Hopefully by that time a patch will have been released to deal with the load times, but I suspect it's just down to tt not being overly familiar with making open-world games. In my opinion it takes longer than it should on Lego Avengers and Lego Batman 3 to transition between hubs, although it's disguised better there with more dynamic loading screens that don't actually look like loading screens. But yeah, underlines my decision not to day-1 this game.

What @shaneoh said...if you legit think the loading screens are too frequent, you're playing the game wrong. It's a non-issue unless you're some hyperactive kid with the attention span of a piece of wood.

I was already unsure whether to pick it up on release day or wait for a sale, but now I think I'm going to pass and put the £40 the game costs here in the UK towards importing a copy of Disgaea 5 Complete from Amazon Japan. That should fill the void once I finish BotW, and last a long while, too.

More disappointed that the game only runs in 720p docked.
If the Wii U could run this in 720p, then the Switch (that is about 2.5 times as powerful) shouldn't have any problems running in 1080p.
Guess this is another game that will run in 480p portable...

I really want to support third party on the Switch, but not when they do lazy ports like this.

And don't give me any "Resolution is not important" crap, well how about they just make all Switch games from now on run in 240p, how about that, cause resolution doesn't matter, right?

First Dragon Quest Heroes runs like shit, Snake Pass looks like mud on the portable, and now this.
Should I fear for the Skyrim port?

First. On some more recent videos the loading times seem to be a tad better than on this video. About half less than the WiiU, which is a big improvement in my book. Would have seen much better, but alas....

Second. The Graphics are quite a bit better. Much better Lightning and color saturation overall. It looks fantastic now!

Third. Seeing it's the same on PS4, it just seems a limitation of the engine they are using at TT games and they are unable to squeeze more out of it.

@Steel76 I Wonder if it's 720p on PS4 as well or just upscaled to 1080p.At most I think the latter and that they just didn't have the assets for this game to support full 1080p resolution, since this game was solely developed for the WiiU at that time and build on those hardware limitations.

@JeronanIt's 3D graphics, and not locked to a set resolution.You can increase the native rendered resolution to 4K on the PC.But, maybe they didn't bother to render the graphics at a higher res on the Switch, and just, as you said, did a simple upscale instead, to save some time...

Still waiting to see whether the entirety of the game is available on the cartridge before considering a purchase. If there's a 13GB download involved in the Switch version (be it optional or otherwise), I'm skipping this. No excuses for not storing all of the data on the cartridge.

This was a good game. But no way is it worth the money for a replay on the Switch. I hope your review reflects that little effort has been put into the Switch version to justify the asking price. Anyone who still has a Wii u can pick a copy up for. £20.00.

Wasn't going to double-dip on it anyway, so I just find this funny.Would be interested to see a comparison with the other console versions as well... see if it's just the Nintendo console that got screwed over with optimisation as usual, or just lazyness on the developer's part in general.

@KevinJB1988 If you never played it and already own the Switch, it is really worth getting. No matter the haters.

Just check the more recent videos, the loading times when you're ingame isn't that bad. Much better than the WiiU.Only the initial load from save game (main menu) seems to be a tad long still (about 35-45 seconds).

Graphics wise the game looks much better now too compared to the WiiU version.

You also get CO-OP now and able to take it on the go!

It's an amazing game. One of a kind and the only real open world Lego game TT has made so far.(Lego Worlds I don't Count as it's more like a Lego Minecraft kind of game).

@Jeronan I find it to be a good rule of a thumb to ignore anyone who refers to dissenting comments/reviews as "haters" or other, more insulting language. If you can't make your point without crapping on others, you're no better than them.

@Zebetite I am talking about the people that troll these forums and crap on anything Nintendo.
You'd wonder why they even bother coming to a Nintendo fan site in the first place.

There is a difference in being critical or downright hating/trolling.

I too would have liked more improvement, but it is what it is and I honestly believe it's just a limitation of the game and the engine it's build upon.
Lego City Undercover is a massive game. The largest game they ever made. The open world. The amount of content. It's massive.
You get more than your money's worth out of this game.

While I'm a little disappointed by this, I'm not entirely surprised. However, I'll still be getting it. Mainly for the co-op. For me it was sorely missed on WiiU because my boys and I enjoy playing Lego games together. So I feel I'll get my moneys worth even if I played the original to death. I do hope they still have the Nintendo references on Switch. They were fun.

@Zebetite Loading from Cartridge is always going to be slow. If People expect the same kind of performance like the expensive highend sd cards, then they are delusional.People are already complaining about the so called Switch tax, well expect to pay 100 bucks for a game, if you want high end performance from a game cartridge.

Thanks to the information of this article, I will now buy this game digitial and put it on my SD card (or maybe even internal Storage) to reduce loading times even further.

I have seen some recent youtube videos With load times much better than shown in this article's video, so it seems to be load times from cartridge, since it was recorded on a Convention.

@dew12333 The games at that time were a mere couple megabytes at most in size.Now we are talking about multiple GB's in size and loading all that from a game cartridge is going to take time.Loading from disc is even slower, hence why on other consoles like the PS4 you forced to install games on HDD before you can even start playing.

People, calm down !Loading a HUGE City with So Many details will take a lot of times. It will NOT Loaded in 1 or 2 seconds.Stop complaining for such a trivial matters like that. At least, Switch version is 10-11 seconds faster than Wii U. Is waiting for 50 seconds so hard to do ?I will buy this game despite of this trivial matter.This is also a Patience Test for all of you.

This is a clear case of bad optimization. The game was inherently badly optimized from the ground up, it would take a miracle (or an insanely huge load of work, which they wouldn't do for a port like this) to optimize it so it loads quickly. Remember, this is a very early Wii U open world game by a 3rd party developer; even Breath of the Wild has long loading times, and that's a 1st part Nintendo title (who are notorious for their extremely well-done programming and compression) that came out at the very end of Wii U's life. I wouldn't have expected Lego City to be much improved, especially seeing as it's now a port across several different systems (them being more powerful doesn't mean much in cases of bad optimization).

What I see in the video is that the Switch version loads significantly faster and looks better than Wii U. Plus the mini-build thing on the loading screen gives you at least something to look at while you wait. Glass half full

@Jeronan Disagree that "loading from cartidge is always going to be slow." Carts and SD storage are fundamentally similar technologies when it comes to the raw operation of reading data. Whichever edges out the other is going to come down to interface and system bottlenecks that aren't easy for us as consumers to see.

One or the other may win in practice on the Switch, but a blanket judgment of carts always being slower than SD is misguided.

I think everyone proclaiming this to be laziness on the part of the dev should offer their game development services to TT. Clearly they are more knowledgeable about game project management, the engineering tasks involved and data management concerns of these games than the slackers at TT who obviously don't know what they're doing.

That way, the commenters get to show off their skills, the guys at TT are forced to buck up their ideas on future titles, and we all get faster load times. Win win.

lets be honest, loading times are not good on WiiU neither on Switch (or on any other console) will be.. but at all quality of game is (for me) good and to get Undercover on go is perfect. It will really help to get any mini-game while loading (like in Splatoon lobby). I finished Chase on WiiU, I'll finish it on Switch also.

It's a fantastic, massive gane that I eventually 100% on Wii U, my son and I played it like mad last Summer. Load times were a pain but they weren't that frequent, and if they're improved here then all the better.

This is probably my son's favourite game on the Wii U. Him and I played this a lot and reached 98% or so. Coop is big plus. I actually bought Lego Super Heroes which had the coop feature, but the game didn't had the same feel as Lego City. Shame we don't have a Switch or I would be buying it so I could play with my son. The loading times everyone complaints is not a problem for me.

@Fuz yeah probably unfair to call developers lazy. There does seem to be issues with the original coding though. The load times are bad on all platforms so it looks like TT developers couldn't get past the original coding.

This was a fantastic game on the WiiU, my first copy died on its disc... Ended up buying it again digitally.

It's not a lazy port, it's just the way the engine and game works. It's the same speed on all consoles. As ram goes up, it takes longer to load everything into ram.

For anyone that hasn't played this, it's going to be the 2nd best game on the Switch until more games arrive. And there is probably more than 100hrs of game play here to get to 100%. Easily the best Lego game to date.

If this gets down to $30 AU, I'll buy this again for the Switch when I get one. It will totally keep the kids occupied.

@kobashi100 That'd be my guess. Hard decisions made early on in development can be incredibly difficult to reverse when it becomes clear that change is needed. 'Let's start again with the knowledge we have now' is almost never an option.

It is disappointing it's not a more dramatic improvement but it is a significant improvement. If you haven't watched the video you should. Funny thing about load times is they don't bother you until they do. By which I mean there is a threshold where you barely notice or care (probably 30 seconds or so for many people) and then every second after feels like it's taking forever. This looks like its lowering that time closer to the bar. In that one instance it eliminated a load screen altogether.

Not amazing but a definite improvement. Will be better for everyone who hasn't played. Not double dipping on this one, though, gotta save double dip money for Mario Kart

@SLIGEACH_EIREThe other big reason to pick up the game is co-op play and that was why I was considering a double dip at one time. Was always a bit off to have a LEGO game without co-op (even though this is probably the best LEGO game there is).

Load times are improved, though, and just maybe I'd be more inclined to buy again if the load times became near instantaneous but even then I paid full price for the original day one and can't quite stomach it ... and already have a Switch backlog on top of my Wii U backlog on top of my Wii backlog on top of my PC/Mac backlog and iOS backlog. Lol

@wariosmith Right. That's about the threshold for many people I think. Zelda load times are just about perfect in that once they reach that 30 seconds you really start to feel it but it doesn't happen much. Every second after that first 30 starts to feel much longer.

That's why shaving off ~10 seconds from load times as the Switch version of this game does can feel much better in practice than you might think. For most people I'm guessing anyway.

Not too bad, seems like the biggest gripe is the initial load screen but the switch has sleep mode so you can just continue the game with little to no down time. I'm buying this the moment I can on the eshop.

@DBPirateYup.Loading time has been cut for 10-11 seconds.Plus, TT Fushion has redesigned the U/I during gameplay. They added Hexagon shape on the Right + Left Top for Character profile and Hexagon shape onfor Right + Left Bottom for Mini map and Video message.Looks like 3DS version. Even better looking.

I said something about it in another post that they obviously hadn't optimized it due to it still being 720p. This further shows that it's a cash in attempt. They COULD have optimized it but didn't. Won't be buying this.

@SwitchVogel While I agree with you the loading times are still better than Wii U, so for Nintendo owners worth having. But seeing how load times are almost non-existent on PS4 is where I agree it must be lazy programming, unless the game world is cached in the PS4s 8GB RAM at all times.

How is it on other platforms though? Relatively the same? Better? Sounds like a case of lazy WB ports to me. The PC version is $20 on some sites, might pick it up if I ever finish the 5 other open world games I'm in the middle of.

I really enjoyed the game on the Switch and while the load times were horrendous I had a great experience with it. My wife and I played through it together. I will be picking up my copy today for the Switch simply because of the Co-op. My son was too young to enjoy it on the Wii U when it came out but we are going to play through it together now on the Switch. Still, the load times are a pity.

We can complain about Lego City, but TT games aren't known for being technically skilled in any shape or form.

Lego City was poorly optimised for Wii U in the first place but this is an inherent issue with the archaic lego engine - the engine itself was first used on PS2 and everything since then has been bolt ons.

TT need to dump their archaic engine and start from scratch. Simple as.

I find it silly that people are making such a fuss over load times. If what some are saying is true the game actually loads faster than what is suggested in this video. Plus PS4 has the same load times so it's probably more of the engine rather than the system. I don't think the load times are nearly as bad as Skyrim either

I don't think anyone thought the load times for LCU were ever because of the WiiU hardware but were an issue with the game itself. it would have been nice if they corrected it somehow, but I'm guessing it just bulk loads most of the game world into memory all at once instead of streaming it as you travel the way most open world games do, and that's a fundamental design issue that can't really be corrected. It sucks, it's infamous, but it's what the game can do. I'm glad they shaved some time off, and thankfully with Switch once the game is loaded you can LEAVE it loaded in suspend mode which helps a lot so you don't need to worry about it every time you pick it up. But by reports it's not really better on any other platform, and confirms that the bulk of the load times was not due to reading it off BD, that added to it ,but only made a bad design worse. TT had no experience with open world beyond this game, so they probably used whatever approach they normally use for their level based games and treated the whole world as a big "level" rather than using methodology specifically for open world environments.

Disappointing, but not surprising, and it's still one of the greatest games of the past decade either way.

On-off topic, does anyone know how co-op will work in this game? I haven't actually played any lego games with coop. I assume "2 players over local play with two copies of the game in two handheld switches" won't be a thing here (which is a shame, 3DS-style local is the most fun coop without fighting over camera control )

@gatorboi352 The Switch's floating point performance is well over twice that of the Wii U in docked mode, and that doesn't account for the fact that the Switch uses a much more modern and efficient architecture than the Wii U.

Not worth the money, especially for those of us who played the original on Wii U. There's absolutely no reason for this game to still have loading screens that long. Not when Breath of the Wild has rather short loading screens on both Switch and Wii U. If you really want to play this game and still have a Wii U, then pick up a used copy or get one of the newly-branded Nintendo Selects version for $29 CDN. There's absolutely no reason to pay the $60+ to get this on Switch when loading screens are still that long.

Apart from the initial game boot up loading time, there are only 2 instances in the game that need to load:1. Getting into and out of the police station2. Getting into and out of a missionIn my opinion that's not much, but of course 1-minute loading to get back into the open world after visiting the police station or after finishing a mission can feel unnaturally long.

Another thing is, as you can see in the video, Switch loading times are reduced by 20% compared to the Wii U version. For me that's a good improvement (along with the 2P co-op).

But I won't double dip a 59,99€ on it. I got the Wii U version for 34,99€.

I'm not sure about the range of this kind of article, or the impact in sales, but anyway, I wouldn't say this is a lazy port. Is just a port like they did for PS4... I mean... now it takes 50 seconds...but even if it was 30 seconds we would be complaining. Unless the developers have a secret, I don't think it's gonna be like 15 seconds (probably it could be only starting the game from scratch).

OK, seems there was some overreaction here. Turns out the load times are quite a bit better than the Wii U version, especially off internal memory. More so, the game runs at 1080p with what appears to be similar performance as on Wii U (30 fps with some dips). The DOF appears to be lessened, but some (like me) prefer less blur which sort of ruins LOD.

So, it seems to be a reasonable port of an unoptimized source code. Pretty much what should have been expected. They were never going to completely overhaul the engine.

@ACK Thank you for the alternate analysis! Supported by this article, I was about to disdain the lack of anything good and unique on Switch, but you have alleviated my concerns somewhat with the information you provided, here. Now, I'll still be looking forward to buying this, eventually.

@ACK@Steel76 It's probably fairer to compare physical vs physical and digital vs digital rather than muddying the waters between the two. Not fair to compare a BD disc to a UHC1 card and not fair to compare the gamecard to a USB SSD etc. I think the video above was doing physical vs physical. And it's still better, but not overwhelming (maybe that video is an older version though.)

Also "less Depth of Field" would mean that the in-focus area is shallower and more of the background is blurred out. You either mean MORE DoF, or you mean weaker application of the DoF effect filter. That might just be my photography forum instinct kicking in. I'll refrain from asking about the bokeh.

@NEStalgia Depth of Field refers to an effect which blurs the surrounding scenery to differentiate from near and far objects as well as to theoretically improve the appearance of distant objects by softening sharp edges and aliasing. Considering that many games have no Depth of Field effect, I do not see it as inappropriate to refer to a weaker effect as less. The effect intends to mimic a camera lense, but we are not viewing games through a lenses, so the effect is not there by default.

I mean weaker effect, as I want stuff in the distance to stay sharp and in focus I like the effect in cutscenes, but not during gameplay, as it feels like walking around with my glasses off, when stuff in the distance is blurry

@Steel76@Gauchorino Glad to help! Pretty disappointing to see this rushed article exclusively focused on load times in an unpatched version of the game. Moreover, two writers for the site storm in to instigate a "lazy port" narrative in the first two posts with little analysis or background. Amateur.

I will say I am still worried about co-op performance, even if I'm dubious about how much of a benefit it is to LCU. Would be nice if there was at least an option for local co-op across two Switches.

@ACK Depth of Field refers to the depth of the field of vision. Increased depth of field means the in-focus plane projects deeper into the field. Reduced depth of field means the in focus plane is shallower and more of the background is out of focus. Larger aperature and closer focus reduces DoF and increases blur. Stopping down to smaller apertures and focusing farther out increases DoF and increases blur.

The rendering effect is meant to approximate that real world camera effect in the virtual camera.

@NEStalgia Well, yes you are accurate in the general sense. However in videogame parlance DoF refer to the effect, little more. There are other factors that contribute to an effective depth of field like you mention, such as draw distance and level of detail. But we don't generally refer to your actual depth of vision as DoF in games as it is in a virtual sense there is no real depth. This is why the effect is applied and generally it is understood to be referring to the specific technique rather than in general terms, so as to differentiate from the various technical factors conspiring to achieve the sightlines in a videogame sense.

Obviously we are sort of arguing semantics, so I'll at least attempt to signify the strength of the effect rather than relying on a quantitative term to be more clear. Thanks.

@ACK Yeah I think that's one of those things that in the game industry became a slang/shorthand of just saying "increasing the DoF" when what's really really meant is "increasing the level of DoF effect applied", but when taken out of the context of "industry slang" the statement actually says the opposite of what it's actually meaning just because it's the understood shorthand without the inverse adjectives included Originally I'm certain it was referred to the "right" way in rendering as well since the whole point is to simulate a real camera more realistically. Really it's referring to the out-of-focus blur or the bokeh effect, so DoF is technically inaccurate all around But at least that one gets transposed often enough in photography/cinema as well

This is quite disappointing given that the system has already shown it's more than capable of loading giant open-world areas in a reasonable amount of time. I'm guessing this was treated more like a quick port than it deserved and that the game engine wasn't really updated to take advantage of the Switch's capabilities. If so, that's pretty lame.

Let's see how things look after the patch. If the load times are still consistently 30 seconds+, I don't think I'll be picking this up.